Thursday, November 02, 2023
Dawn of Skynet?
The Guardian reports that the UK, US, EU, Australia and China have all agreed that artificial intelligence poses a potentially catastrophic risk to humanity, in the first international declaration to deal with the fast-emerging technology.
The paper says that twenty-eight governments signed up to the so-called Bletchley declaration on the first day of the AI safety summit, hosted by the British government, with the countries agreeing to work together on AI safety research, even amid signs that the US and UK are competing to take the lead over developing new regulations:
Michelle Donelan, the UK technology secretary, told reporters: “For the first time we now have countries agreeing that we need to look not just independently but collectively at the risks around frontier AI.”
Frontier AI refers to the most cutting-edge systems, which some experts believe could become more intelligent than people at a range of tasks. Speaking to the PA news agency on the sidelines of the summit, Elon Musk, the owner Tesla and SpaceX, and of X, formerly Twitter, warned: “For the first time, we have a situation where there’s something that is going to be far smarter than the smartest human … it’s not clear to me we can actually control such a thing.”
Does this mean we are heading for a Terminator-style catastrophe? Who knows. What is clear however, is that despite this declaration and apparent agreement on the direction of travel, there is little international agreement over what a global set of AI regulations might look like or who should draw them up.
The paper says that twenty-eight governments signed up to the so-called Bletchley declaration on the first day of the AI safety summit, hosted by the British government, with the countries agreeing to work together on AI safety research, even amid signs that the US and UK are competing to take the lead over developing new regulations:
Michelle Donelan, the UK technology secretary, told reporters: “For the first time we now have countries agreeing that we need to look not just independently but collectively at the risks around frontier AI.”
Frontier AI refers to the most cutting-edge systems, which some experts believe could become more intelligent than people at a range of tasks. Speaking to the PA news agency on the sidelines of the summit, Elon Musk, the owner Tesla and SpaceX, and of X, formerly Twitter, warned: “For the first time, we have a situation where there’s something that is going to be far smarter than the smartest human … it’s not clear to me we can actually control such a thing.”
Does this mean we are heading for a Terminator-style catastrophe? Who knows. What is clear however, is that despite this declaration and apparent agreement on the direction of travel, there is little international agreement over what a global set of AI regulations might look like or who should draw them up.
